Living with our grief.
I could write many many articles about grief. So many in fact that I don’t know quite how to start this one. In a world where grief has been made something to fear, something that should be private, something that should be moved through quickly without making anyone too uncomfortable. In fact the DSM 5 gives a two week window for grief before any other diagnosis should be given. Absolutely wild.
So here is the truth friend, grief is always with us.
Our fear of death in the west is cutting us off from this part of our aliveness.
Because yes, grief is aliveness.
The rhythm of being alive in the form of our pain and our joy.
The two can never be separated.
When we hold on to or try to bury our grief we are holding our breath. Literally stopping life from moving through us.
We become disconnected from everything, ourselves, our home, each other.
Grief is a practice, it’s something we need to tend to as a part of being a human if we want to love and live fully.
As I have become more and more embodied, I have become more connected to the impermanence of everything. It is always ending. Every time I choose to love someone, whether they’re human, animal or plant, I am acknowledging that it is already coming to an end.
I can’t feel love without grief.
This means that grief is always moving through me. It’s always present and it needs space. It needs to be tended to through art, movement, connection and ritual.
I know our relationship with emotions is complicated, my journey and my work shows me this every single day. We especially do our best to keep the more challenging ones at bay. I know because I can also find them deeply overwhelming, especially my grief.
Another thing to note about grief is that while it is always present, perhaps you notice it in that moment where you become aware of everything ending, perhaps a special day with friends or family that you don’t want to end, or the witnessing of autumn and everything decaying, there are also times where our grief is huge and painful. Loss of loved ones, relationships ending, loss of our health, losing jobs, death of pets are some of the bigger moments in life where we can experience the full depths of our sorrow. But this can also be the realisation around loss of childhood from trauma, or perhaps a diagnosis of neurodivergence and a grief around what could have been. We also experience grief around the parts of us that have never known love, the collective sorrow, ancestral & generational grief and grief for this life not being as our bodies expected (The five gates of grief by Francis Weller) there is also the grief for the harm we have caused others (Holly Truhlar, Racheal Rice & Desiree Adaway).
For me when I feel into my grief, it feels like a river that runs through me and connects me to everything. It’s a river of aliveness, that is always flowing, carving it’s way through my body, widening my skin and demanding that my heart breaks and softens. Sometimes the river is soft & gentle, like a bubbling stream and other times it’s raging, all consuming and feels like it might pull me under. In these times, I now know to surrender to the torrent despite how terrifying that might seem.
This is where grief is initiating, transformative and shape shifting.
Again we live in a culture that demands we find a fixed, productive, youthful state and do everything we can to stay there.
We live in a world of children alive in adult bodies refusing the call to step forward into life, responsibility, love and the fullness of our adult selves.
We refuse the truth of being in bodies of nature, that we are food, we decay and we die.
Francis Weller says it better than me and I love this quote from his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow…
‘‘Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as people. It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognise a ‘still deeper grief… a sadness at the very heart of things’ that binds us with the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance & heroic striving’’
How do we grieve?
I get asked this all the time and I feel that first of all it’s important to say that grief is not something we are meant to do alone. It’s one of the greatest sorrows for me that this is something we force into the shadows, behind closed doors both in the physical and metaphorical sense. Ultimately we will need a bigger vessel, the group, a bigger space to experience the fullness of our grief but that might feel too much if we are just starting to feel into allowing our grief to pour.
Grief is also deeply somatic. Quite often it will rise from our bellies, through our chest like a wave. Often it finds itself forced back down when it reaches our throat, wails silenced, tears frozen, screams swallowed. Grief is feral. Ruth Allen calls it Big Animal Work and in her book Weathering she says…
‘‘Grief is the most visceral, bone rattling, feral thing you will ever know. Even the smaller losses can shake the earth for a while, upsetting all the balances we set our clocks by. Grief tenderises us. It pounds on the muscles, fibres, organs, bones, of us and courses through the fluids. It rips open the very vessel designed to hold together the assemblage of parts that are supposed to keep us alive. It is the most raw and frantic way of experiencing the words I love’’
So you see in many ways, grief is not something we do, it’s something we become. Which can be terrifying. So often we seek to shut it off as fast as possible both in ourselves and others. And this is why we need the bigger body, the group or maybe even nature. When we grieve we need a bottom and we can create this for ourselves through ritual.
Ritual is essentially a vessel, a container created through various actions, objects and symbols. It might be dance, singing, an invocation, an altar, the use of fire or water, naming etc. When it comes to grief, ritual can be a framework, a bottom that can support us while we explore this expression of our aliveness.
It does not need to be complex. It could be as simple as getting cosy, lighting a candle and naming your sorrows then allowing whatever needs to come forward to flow & express, then closing with some simple resourcing like naming objects in the room you are in, singing a mantra or having a stretch and a shake.
You could try collaging or painting, movement & dance, make a playlist for your sorrow, let it move you.
Make time regularly. As a therapist, if I don’t engage in regular practices with my grief, I quickly start to harden, to burn out, sometimes it become bitterness.
So I tend, weekly, if not daily. I can’t remember a day that I didn’t cry for a very long time.
I am in daily connection with my sorrow & pain.
And do you know what? I experience so much more joy, sometimes euphoria, so much more connection and the world is so much more beautiful to me. I have witnessed this in my clients and the group spaces I have guided.
Grief is the portal back to our aliveness.
And to name, that grief isn’t always crying, sometimes its a rage that burns.
When you feel ready, I would seek out spaces for collective grief. This is where you will held and be given a bottom strong enough to let yourself fully experience your grief. Our grief is always interconnected and this is why the group is so powerful and needed.
I am beginning to offer grief rituals in collaboration with other practitioners, you can join my email list below for these details and I would also recommend the work of Sophy Banks and Grief Tending https://grieftending.org/
SOME JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR GRIEF.
Write a love letter to your grief.
Where is your grief in your body?
What does it feel like?
What is your relationship to grief?
How has your grief transformed your relationship to life?
What are you grieving for right now?
I hope that this blog post has been supportive, perhaps validating. Grief underpins all of my work with clients, especially with trauma. If this is something you would like to explore with me you can find all the details of my one to one work on the button below.
If you are not ready for one to one work, are interested in my workshops, somatic classes, retreats and collective grief rituals then I would recommend joining my email list below. I also send a weekly email with insights and recommendations like this blog post.